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SETI@Home Expanding Goals With Sun's Help
GabeK writes "The Register is reporting that the SETI@home project is going to be expanding the scope of their project with the help of Sun. Sun is donating a fleet of servers to the SETI@home project for use in its new BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) project. This project will use Sun's new JXTA peer-to-peer protocol for distributed computing, and will add other functions to the project other than looking for little green men. Users will now be able to dedicate slices of their idle time to projects other than SETI, like cancer research and climate mapping." We previously mentioned early word of BOINC a couple of months back.
I still can't see any information on their website as to when they will upgrade to BOINC.. Which is a shame.. I'm a top 5000 user and I want to switch ASAP :)
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
Java? Really? I love Java and Sun, but Java isn't the fastest thing in the world. For something that uses advanced algorithms that are usually optimized in Assembly, is Java really a good choice?
Fortress of Insanity
The whole premise behind SETI is that there are intelligent beings 'out there' in the universe that are broadcasting their signals into space. Even if there were beings doing just that, they would be hundreds if not thousands if not millions or billions of light years away from us making any sort of coherent response to a signal meaningless.
If there were beings out there who had the capacity for interstellar travel (and that's the only kind that would matter because anything less than that would make communication impossible) they would have already found this noisy planet and if not made contact at least monitored us from a safe distance.
So either way SETI is unlikely to find anything meaningful. I'm with the Christians on this one. The search for extra-terrestrial life is only a substitute for the search for meaning within one's self and with one's God.
I have been pwned because my
Why don't we combine this new idea of distributed computing with a P2P network? It should be technically feasable, and then the eff people could run an ad campain such as, "The RIAA is against Kazaa. Kazaa cures cancer. Therefore, RIAA is for cancer!" similar to the campain comercial in Head of State.
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Squirrel
My father's cancer is gone thanks to a treatment that was just an EXPERIMENT several years ago.
People are only fooling themselves if they think that by running these that they'll see prompt effects.
Research needs experiments to validate/invalidate it. Successful research experiments can lead to experimental treatments, which can become standard treatments.
So coming from someone who has family members who were cured by things that were at one point just "an experiment", I say learn what you're talking about, and until then shut up.
In the past SETI@home had many network problems, with Berkeley throttling down the available bandwidth for SETI... Will BOINC adress this issue? There doesn't seem to be any information about this on the BOINC pages, and additional clients will probably increase the demand for bandwith further. I guess it's feasible to place the BOINC servers outside the Berkeley network infrastructure.
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
or looked at JXTA recently,
it just got a *lot* better.
Check out the main website
and this review of JXTA 2 by DeveloperWorks
Cheers, Joel
Old S@H protocol was full of security flaws. Due to lack of verification of returned data it was possible to modify the workunits. And people did it, just to make them compute fast. In the fisrt 100 places of current Top 1000 list there is at least 10 cheaters. I've heard some time ago that approx 30% of workunits results returned to Berkeley was fake.
BOINC prevents this. S@H will now able to verify iof returned result is real or cheated.
That I've had with friends - why the hell are you using your computer to look for little green men (who, even if they contact us, are near enough to come to us, and do so, will probably make us into gourmet ready-meals for their home planet, or smething) when they could be running something like the UD Cancer Project
This gives SETI more legitimacy IMO... as a fun project attatched to one with real value. Of course, I suppose Sun probably couldn't stomach donating to a commercial venture like UD, so I won't criticize them for choosing SETI.
How about a "community" distributed computing project? A true P2P thing where anyone can upload a job and have it processed by folks, and in return provide computing power to others. No centralized server and formalized infrastructure, just a bunch of geeks crunching data for each other.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
As far as your assertions that ET would of already heard us and visited us if they existed, there are MANY possibilities that can include intelligent life not traveling here for any number of reasons. But that goes into the realm of speculation. Seti is about hard science, and the seti project is extremely cautious about making any sort of claim.
The problem of why ET would not have visited us is a serious one (the Fermi Paradox), and is a compelling argument for SETI being a waste of time. Lack of visits implies that either there are ETs out there and not one of them is even slightly interested in space flight (the entire galaxy could be colonised at sublight speeds within tens of millions of years), or that there are none there at all.
If it is the Calvin and Hobbes quote you are referring to, this is where it is from: Scientific Progress goes "Boink?", first published 01/10/1990 :)
The problem of why ET would not have visited us is a serious one (the Fermi Paradox), and is a compelling argument for SETI being a waste of time. Lack of visits implies that either there are ETs out there and not one of them is even slightly interested in space flight (the entire galaxy could be colonised at sublight speeds within tens of millions of years), or that there are none there at all.
So, then, there is no possibility that they came by, saw us, decided that either we weren't ready for a visit (which I believe personally - not that they came by already, but that we aren't ready), or that they came by and throught we weren't technologically ready for the visit, or? Why does it half to be that they simply aren't interested in space travel or aren't there at all, and that's it? Why can there not be any other possibilities?
bork bork bork!
There's an idea that since your computer isn't doing anything anyway, the seti screen saver is zero cost. Not so. My CPU runs 5 degrees Centigrade hotter when running seti@home than if a basic screensaver is running. Thus there is even more strain on the hardware. Currently, about 1100 years of CPU time per day are devoted to seti@home. Not sure what the increased power usage is, but for each watt that's roughly 10 megawatt-hours per day of energy going up in smoke (or CO2). Since the idea of finding an alien signal by these means is clearly a non-starter after so many years, it's about time more justifiable projects were found.
"The problem of why ET would not have visited us is a serious one (the Fermi Paradox), and is a compelling argument for SETI being a waste of time. Lack of visits implies that either there are ETs out there and not one of them is even slightly interested in space flight (the entire galaxy could be colonised at sublight speeds within tens of millions of years), or that there are none there at all."
Wait a sec. Your comment about "lack of visits" should be clarified. It is quite conceivable that extra terrestrials have visited Earth without one being labeled as a "tin foil hat" brigade. Just because no aliens have landed in New York City near the U.N. and asked to be *taken to our leader* does not mean they haven't been here. It is not hard to believe that aliens would conduct themselves like our own Special Ops does; sneak in and sneak out with as little detection as possible. This is highly probable since a single alien ship landing on our planet would be outnumbered greatly by the amount of humans (5 billion?) and any one of us could be labeled as "hostile."
From what I gather, you are from the school of thought that complains about not having any tangible evidence in your hand of a visitation to our planet. But let's use a *real world* example to show how foolish that is. There are numerous items that our Department of Defense builds each year that have no real paper trail due to being part of the "black projects" (and I'm not talking about flying UFOs at Area 51 but *actual* classified weapons). Just because you don't have access to those records does not mean that they don't exist.
And as for the Fermi Paradox, that's nice to try to explain extra terrestrials with, but you are judging alleged advanced beings by our own scientific knowledge. If you rely upon that, in 100 years you might look as foolish as the people who claimed if a human drove a car faster than 35 mph they'd die, or even better, a Biblical passage where Joshua commands the sun to stand still...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Lack of visits is no problem at all. What basis is there to assume that a space faring race would choose Earth as a destination? There are a variety of reasons why they may not be interested in coming here. For example, if their reason for venturing into space was colonisation, don't you suppose they'd look for EMPTY planets?
As for probes and space stations... You're joking, right? Only recently have we even been able to detect Earth sized planets around other stars, and we still can't observe them visually. How are we supposed to be detecting probes and space stations at equal distances?